Tag Archives: financial regulation

The Harvard Law Review recently published a multi-book review by Adam Levitin, the go-to guy for congressional testimony on toxic mortgages, illegal foreclosures, and homeowner relief (or, rather, the failure of the administration to provide any). It’s a tough genre: Levitin had to write something coherent about six very different books by Bernanke, Bair, Barofsky, Blinder, Connaughton, and Admati and Hellwig, whose sole point of commonality is that they all had something to do with the financial crisis. I don’t agree with all the aspects of his discussions of each individual book, but I think Levitin did a good job using the books as a starting point for a discussion of the incentives problem in financial regulation: the problem that regulators have stronger incentives to favor the industry than to defend the public interest.

HLR asked me to write an online “response,” which in some ways is an even less appetizing prospect—writing something interesting about something someone else (whom I generally agree with) wrote about six other things by different people. On the other hand, they only wanted 2,000 words, so I said yes.

My response focuses on a separate reason that regulation can be captured by industry: ideology. This is something that Levitin does discuss in the body of his article, but I think is not directly addressed by his proposed solutions. If you want to read more, you can download it from SSRN or read it at the HLR site.

Credit Suisse’s guilty plea to a charge of tax fraud seems to be a major step forward for a Justice Department that was satisfied both before and after the financial crisis with toothless deferred prosecution agreements and large-sounding fines that were easily absorbed as a cost of doing business. A criminal conviction certainly sounds good, and I agree that it’s better than not a criminal conviction. But what does it mean at the end of the day?

Most obviously, no one will go to jail because of the conviction (although several Credit Suisse individuals are separately being investigated or prosecuted). And for Credit Suisse, business will go on as usual, minus some tax fraud—that’s what the CEO said. A criminal conviction can be devastating to an individual. But when public officials go out of their way to ensure that a conviction has as little impact as possible on a corporation, it’s not clear how this is better than a deferred prosecution agreement.

Roger Myerson, he of the 2007 Nobel Prize, wrote a glowing review of The Banker’s New Clothes, by Admati and Hellwig, for the Journal of Economic Perspectives a while back. Considering the reviewer, the journal, and the content of the review (which describes the book as “worthy of such global attention as Keynes’s General Theory received in 1936″), it’s about the highest endorsement you can imagine.

Myerson succinctly summarizes Admati and Hellwig’s key arguments, so if you haven’t read the book it’s a decent place to start. To recap, the central argument is that under Modigliani-Miller, the debt-to-equity ratio doesn’t affect the cost of capital and therefore doesn’t affect banks’ willingness to extend credit; the real-world factors that make Modigliani-Miller untrue (deposit insurance, taxes, etc.) rely on a transfer of value from another party that makes society no better off.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the SEC will soon decide (well, sometime this year) whether brokers should be subject to a fiduciary standard in their dealings with clients, as registered financial advisers are today. At present, brokers only need to show that investments they recognize are “suitable” for their clients—roughly speaking, that they are in an appropriate asset class.

Not surprisingly, the brokerage industry is up in arms. They want to be able to push clients into the products for which they receive the highest commissions—a practice that (they say) could be more difficult under a fiduciary standard. According to one lobbyist,

“a universal fiduciary standard could end up hurting many investors. Lower- and middle-income investors often turn to brokers who are compensated through product commissions, he says, because such clients are less attractive to financial advisers who are compensated based on a percentage of assets under management. Higher costs could prompt some brokers to drop commission-based accounts in favor of more-lucrative accounts that charge a percentage of assets under management, leaving many lower- and middle-income investors without anyone to turn to for investment advice.”

A few days ago I wrote a post that began with New York Fed President William Dudley talking tough about banks: “There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions.” The thrust of that post was that I’m not very encouraged when regulators talk about culture and the “trust issue” but don’t indicate how they are going to actually affect industry behavior.

As they say, talk is cheap, whiskey costs money. What’s more important than what regulators say is what they do—and don’t talk about. Peter Eavis (who wrote the earlier story about bank regulators that my previous post was responding to) wrote a new article detailing how that same William Dudley has delayed the finalization of the supplementary leverage ratio: the backup capital standard that requires banks to maintain capital based on their total assets, not using risk weighting.

Dudley has said, “I do not feel that I in any way hold any allegiance or loyalty to the financial industry whatsoever.” That may be true; he certainly made enough at Goldman that he has no real financial incentive to continue to make nice with Wall Street.* Yet at the same time he appears to be parroting concerns raised by some of the big banks, raising a concern about the leverage rule that Felix Salmon calls “very silly” and that, according to Eavis, the Federal Reserve mother ship in Washington didn’t consider significant.

In the grand scheme of banks and their allies weakening and slowing down new regulation, this is probably not a particularly momentous battle. But it does put things in perspective.

* Of course, we know that among some people (many of whom live in New York and work in finance), no amount of money is ever enough.

Last week Peter Eavis of DealBook highlighted a statement made last year by New York Fed President William Dudley (formerly of Goldman Sachs, then a top lieutenant to Tim Geithner): “There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions.” There was a point, say in 2008, when many people probably thought that our largest banks were just guilty of shoddy risk management, dubious sales practices, and excessive risk-taking. Since then, we’ve had to add price fixing, money laundering, bribery, and systematic fraud on the judicial system, among other things.

Eavis also tried to make something positive out of a couple of other recent comments. Dudley said, “I think that trust issue is of their own doing—they have done it to themselves,” while OCC head Thomas Curry said, “It is not going to work if we approach it from a lawyerly standpoint. It is more like a priest-penitent relationship.”

“Except where market discipline is undermined by moral hazard, owing, for example, to federal guarantees of private debt, private regulation generally is far better at constraining excessive risk-taking than is government regulation.”

That was Alan Greenspan back in 2003. This is little different from another of his famous maxims, that anti-fraud regulation was unnecessary because the market would not tolerate fraudsters. It is also a key premise of the blame-the-government crowd (Wallison, Pinto, and most of the current Republican Party), which claims that the financial crisis was caused by excessive government intervention in financial markets.

Market discipline clearly failed in the lead-up to the financial crisis. This picture, for example, shows the yield on Citigroup’s subordinate debt, which is supposed to be a channel for market discipline. (The theory is that subordinated debt investors, who suffer losses relatively early, will be especially anxious to monitor their investments.) Note that yields barely budged before 2008—despite the numerous red flags that were clearly visible in 2007 (and the other red flags that were visible in 2006, like the peaking of the housing market).